I’ve been looking for a new barbershop. The barber I had been going to for years has finally gone around the bend and I can’t stand listening to her prattle on about a bunch of crap. I started going to one of those franchise places (it rhymes with faster buts). They cost too much. So, this little shop in my neighborhood offered very reasonable prices so I thought I’d give it a try. So the other weekend I trundle on in. I meet the previous customer as he’s on the way out, so I go straight to the chair. I tell the guy what I want, he starts up the clippers, which an attached vacuum, and zoom, he’s done. I look at it, he takes a little more off the top and I’m out the door in no more than five minutes.
A lifetime fastest haircut for me. I get home and I notice that he missed, and I did too, a big piece on top my head. Never been touched. Wife trims it for me, and I kind of notice that the sides are a little uneven. I’m not perfectly happy, but not enough to go back.
So, we’re Xmas shopping the following weekend. I’m waiting for my wife outside Target in the van with the kids, and who do I see walking to a car but my new barber. He’s walking with a woman (wife? sister? whatever), she’s pushing the cart and he has his has kind of resting in her coat pocket. She turns down the isle to the car and he is a fraction of a step slow in turning with her. At that point I figure out the guy is following her cause he can’t see well enough to walk on his own.
I think back: the clippers banged my head a few times during the haricut. He missed some fairly obvious spots. And I did notice his eyes looked a little strange.
The man is too blind to walk in a parking lot unaided, but not too blind to cut hair for a living! That strikes me as a little out of balance. I’m giving the guy another shot, and I’m gonna be a little more careful this time, and we’ll see.
Horrors! My fears confirmed! The idiots of the world are gravitating towards the hair cutting profession for some reason. You used to be able to get a reasonable haircut at the franchise ops but anymore you’re taking your hair in your own hands when you walk through the door of one of these joints. Finding a good barber/stylist is just as important as finding a good mechanic.
I was in the U. S. Coast Guard and stationed on a ship home ported in Boston from 1971 to 1973. The Coast Guard base had a barber that worked in a little shop next the the PX. The barber had one eye, and… it was crossed.
I actually saw a segment on some TV program about a guy somewhere – India, I think it was – who was teaching the blind and otherwise visually impaired to cut hair. Their handiwork was pretty good. Maybe the guy you went to took a correspondance course.
I’m still kind of torn between giving the guy a second “look” (har de har har). I mean, geez, a bad haircut’s a bad haircuts. Should I pay for another? Give him a chance to do better?
I made an emergency trip to the eye doctor the other day. Not my usual guy, because I’d lost my reading glasses (I’m supposed to be wearing bi-focals, but I’m too vain, so I have one pair for distance and another pair for reading) and the prescription had expired, so I needed to find someone who’d see me right away.
I won’t even go into how grungy the place was, except to say that the . . . um, thing that you look through to test your eyesight was so scrunged up with makeup and weird black smudges that I didn’t want to put my face against it.
But I digress.
Point is, the doc was wearing these really thick Coke bottle glasses that were WAYYYYYYYY too small for his face and thus didn’t fit over his ears (they stopped about an inch short). He held my paperwork about two inches from his nose to read it. Then, as he was asking me questions about my eyesight, medications, etc., he started writing things down with a ballpoint pen . . .
. . . only the retractable ball point was STILL RETRACTED, so nothing was showing up on the paper. He didn’t seem to notice.
After awhile, he gave up on that, and we started the exam. He told me at one point that I had 20/20 vision (yet I’ve been wearing glasses for four years now), but went ahead and wrote the prescription for the reading glasses (this time with the ball point out).
When I went to get the prescription filled (secretly lamenting the 150 or so bucks I’d probably be shelling out for new specs), it turned out he’d merely written that I should pick up a pair of those reading glasses you can get from the drugstore – 0.75+ strength.
